Attack mitigation tools fall short, security vendors say

SAN FRANCISCO -- Acknowledging that security technologies to prevent cyberattacks are insufficient, several vendors at the RSA Conference here urged companies that are making security plans to assume that at some point, they will be breached.

Rather than pouring resources into stopping all attacks, the better strategy is to acknowledge that some attacks inevitably will get through their defenses, they said. Therefore, the goal of any enterprise security strategy is not to focus on attack mitigation alone, but also on quick detection and response.

"The typical focus today is on trying to prevent malware from getting in through the front door," said Bret Hartman, chief technology officer at RSA. "The problem with that approach is that there's always a percentage [of malware] that does make it through," he said. "There's been an over-emphasis on infiltration. The goal is to shift focus and assume that you have been infiltrated," Hartman said.

Such advice signals an epiphany of sorts in an industry where vendors have always insisted that their technologies, if properly deployed, would protect companies from attacks . Events over the past year, such as the attacks on Google and those tied to Stuxnet have highlighted what many say is the near impossible challenge companies face in fending off determined adversaries.

The vast and growing volumes of data that companies need to manage and the innumerable ways in which that data can be accessed have greatly heightened the need for companies to look beyond traditional defense strategies. While such defenses are useful in blocking about 75% of the threats out there, new approaches are required for dealing with the remaining threats, they said.

Exacerbating the problem is the increasing sophistication of attack tools and approaches, vendors said. Many of the malware tools that companies need to deal with these days have been explicitly designed to evade detection and to remain hidden for long periods. Once such tools infiltrate a network, they are almost impossible to detect and eliminate using traditional detection and removal tools, said Gary Golumb, principal security researcher at Netwitness.

"The industry is, for many reasons, only now beginning to see the warning signs that we are not as effective as we thought we were" in dealing with security threats, Golumb said. In many cases, industry assumptions about the effectiveness of attack mitigation technologies and approaches have been "horribly off base," he said.

Companies such as RSA, Netwitness and several others argue that rather than looking to block specific malware threats, the better approach is to look for the telltale signs of malicious activity that these programs are designed for. Almost all malware tools cause subtle changes in network traffic and behavior that are fairly easy to isolate from the regular "good" traffic on a network.

The trick is in being able to effectively baseline good behavior in such a way as to be able to filter out suspicious or malicious behavior. So, instead of looking for a Stuxnet, or a Zeus or other specific malware program, the focus should be on understanding what normal behavior is, in order to identify the abnormal or potentially malicious behavior generated by such malware.

Security-incident and event-management tools and network anomaly detection tools have delivered bits and pieces of this sort of capability for some time. Going forward the goal is to integrate even more log data and other security event information from multiple sources and to correlate it using risk-based scoring methods, said Jerry Skurla, vice president of marketing at NitroSecurity. "What people underestimated is the amount of data that needs to be looked at," in order to detect and effectively deal with security threats, he said.

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